'On Fighting the Last War (On Poverty)'

The
narrative in the 1970s was that the war on poverty had failed because
of social disintegration: government attempts to help the poor were
outpaced by the collapse of the family, rising crime, and so on. And on
the right, and to some extent in the center, it was often argued that
government aid was if anything promoting this social disintegration. ...

But
that was a long time ago. These days crime is way down, so is teenage
pregnancy, and so on; society did not collapse. What collapsed instead
is economic opportunity. If progress against poverty has been
disappointing over the past half century, the reason is not the decline
of the family but the rise of extreme inequality. We’re a much richer
nation than we were in 1964, but little if any of that increased wealth
has trickled down to workers in the bottom half of the income
distribution.

The trouble is that the American
right is still living in the 1970s, or actually a Reaganite fantasy of
the 1970s; its notion of an anti-poverty agenda is still all about
getting those layabouts to go to work and stop living off welfare. The
reality that lower-end jobs, even if you can get one, don’t pay enough
to lift you out of poverty just hasn’t sunk in. And the idea of helping
the poor by actually helping them remains anathema.

Will
it ever be possible to move this debate away from welfare queens and
all that? I don’t know. But for now, the key to understanding poverty
arguments is that the main cause of persistent poverty now is high
inequality of market income — but that the right can’t bring itself to
acknowledge that reality.